Here’s a brief reflection on what has been hard for me, as well as how I hope to improve it.

It’s overwhelming

I’m very confident that ninety percent of the traffic to my site right now comes from me. That said, when I log in to the page, I’m overwhelmed by data and it’s really hard to pick apart which data is mine and which comes from someone else.

This is compounded by my next challenge.

I did a bad job with URLs

When I was setting up the URLs of the site in Django, it just seemed easier to include a lot of information in the URL itself. So, my site has a lot of things like ‘/group/<id>/’ as a URL, where the individual group number is a part of the URL.

It hasn’t been a problem until now, but now it means that each group shows up as its own URL in the analytics report. That creates a lot of noise for me to try and pick through as I try to see how people who are not me interact with the site.

Even more, once others are using the site more, it’ll make it hard to see how people who aren’t me are actually using it as a product.

What I’m doing now

Google enables you to set up goals in analytics. I didn’t bother with that before, but I’ve established two different goals:

People click through to begin the signup process. I often check what the site will ask of me before I use it. It would be nice to know how well my site is leading people to that opportunity.

People making it to the end of the signup process. Obviously, this is my ‘real goal.’ But, as nobody seems to be doing it, it would be nice to have it recorded when they do. Even more, it would be nice to see what path leads them there.

I’m hoping that Google will not only record how often these goals are ‘achieved,’ but also separate that traffic out from the rest. Where does it come from? What do they click on beforehand?

What I’ll do with my next site

Based on my experience with analytics so far, I think I’ll consider them more in designing the URLs of my site. I’m starting to consider work on the Fantasy Pilgrimage idea and I think that I’ll include more in the query string than in the URL.

Adding things like group numbers (or, in my case, the UUID of specific vocabulary words) in the URL means that each user visits their own specific subset of URLs. Moving them to a query string would mean that each user visits the same URLs and the analytics could give me a more generalized overview of the way users interact with my site.